'Mid-August Lunch'

The Italian film "Mid-August Lunch" puts that test to a test: It pretty much is a documentary of the actors sitting around talking over lunch.

Writer-director and lead actor Gianni Di Gregorio plays a middle-age man living alone with his elderly mother in Rome. He makes an agreement to watch his landlord's mother for a few days over the mid-August holidays. She arrives, with her sister, and then his doctor adds his mother to the club, and the rest of the movie is watching Di Gregorio negotiate the needs, demands and desires of his four aged charges, ending with a great meal, cooked with love and care.

That's pretty much all that happens in the film, which has almost nothing you would call a plot. All there is is the set-up and then the playing out of the personalities against one another.

But the film is more noteworthy for what it doesn't contain than what it does. There are no cliches. None. Zip. This alone is a worthy accomplishment. The old women are never "Golden Girls" stereotypes but always individuals, complicated and interesting. Indeed, the primary reward for watching this film is the feeling of having come to know them.

Nor does the film contain a morsel of sentimentality. It's warm without schmaltz. You come away feeling good but not pandered to.

The film is a slice of life, and although nothing earthshaking happens, at only 75 minutes long, it never quite tries your patience either.